Britain's ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1845, lost while trying to find the Northwest Passage through North America, is a milestone in the annals of Arctic exploration and in American and English modern history. Over the 40 years following the incident, a number of rescue missions went looking for Franklin, none of them successful—although disturbing clues emerged about the fate of his crew. Pulitzer Prize-nominated historian and Emmy Award-winning television producer Martin Sandler presents this well-illustrated and engaging history of these many hopeful missions. One of the most famous efforts was aboard Queen Victoria's warship HMS Resolute, which became locked in ice in 1854 and was abandoned. A year later she was found adrift, steered through a storm to New England, refitted, and returned to the Queen. When Resolute was retired in 1879, the grateful Victoria had the ship's best timbers made into a presidential desk—the one that still occupies the Oval Office today.